A cornucopia

Just visited the Berkeley Bowl supermarket, which has to be one of a kind in the world. This is an iconic Berkeley business and one that that to some degree symbolizes the way of life we associate with this part of California - organic, vegetarian, free trade, co-op, sustainable, recycle ... you get the idea.

 

 Started in 1977 as a neighbourhood vegetable shop, it has grown into an immense emporium of fresh food, organic products, and bulk dry goods. The variety and choice can only be hinted at by the photo of the fridge display above (one of 2 or 3 in a row tucked into a corner of this huge retail space) dedicated essentially to root vegetables (and a couple of types of cabbage). Stunned by a display of about 9 types of radishes and 4 or 5 varieties of beetroot, I couldn't resist taking the photo. 

Somewhat bewildered, we wandered from the organic vegetable section (larger than the vegetable section of most big supermarkets) to the normal vegetable section - the size of a 3 or 4 tennis courts. Just when I felt I had seen it all I would stumble on some new section with more surprises: fresh chick peas or fresh turmeric root, 20 kinds of African root vegetable or Chinese greens, a whole section dedicated to fresh herbs, a meat counter offering buffalo, venison, kangaroo, elk, and camel.

 

I won't even start to talk about the rest of this supermarket. The whole enterprise would be too challenging. 

 

We walked home loaded down with supplies - six short blocks that take us from the edge of Berkeley back to North Oakland - crossing the invisible city line marked only by a change in the colour of the street signs from brown to green. 

 

We flew from Dublin to San Francisco "over the top", (a trip involving hours and hours of staring out of a round window at immensely flat and empty parts of the globe where very few people ever go -- mostly covered in ice. The immense expanse of Hudson Bay was covered with a patchwork of ice floes as June temperatures finally started to break up the solid Winter ice pack. It was a daytime flight and we got no sleep, arriving thick headed and bleary-eyed at SFO where we were quickly and efficiently dumped out onto a pavement - sorry I mean "sidewalk". (The many formalities of entry to the US had been completed online and at Dublin airport and I had been duly quizzed, fingerprinted, and x-rayed to everyone's satisfaction.)

Waiting to greet us were Patti and Joel, who had braved rush-hour traffic to be there. I only realized the heroism involved in that gesture when we spent the next 2 solid hours edging slowly along an endless succession of freeways -- 8 lanes wide and packed solid at 4 pm with commuters making their way home to the East Bay across the Bay Bridge. I had heard and read so much about the joys of living in San Francisco that this awful reality came a a rude shock and led me to wonder why anyone would want to live in a place where such a journey formed an inevitable part of their day.

 Half way across the iconic double level bridge, just after Yerba Buena island, I was startled to see the skeletal remains of a towering ghost bridge break away from the one we were driving on and take a different route across the bay. The impression was strongly reminiscent of the world described in William Gibson's intriguing Bridge Trilogy in which the Oakland Bay Bridge, rendered unstable by an earthquake, has become a vertical shantytown warren inhabited by society's outsiders in a cyberpunk world.

 In the real world, the eastern span of the 70-year-old bridge was unsafe, particularly because of the risk of earthquakes (a section collapsed after a relatively minor quake in 1989), and it has recently been replaced by a modern marvel of engineering, the widest bridge in the world according to the Guinness Book of Records.

 Finally we reached our destination - Jon's house in North Oakland, a neighbourhood bordering Oakland and the adjacent Berkeley (of university fame), a place of stark contrasts and amazing human diversity.

 Of which more anon.

 If anyone is interested in knowing more about the William Gibson trilogy, this is one woman's view :

http://urbanhonking.com/spacecanon/2011/08/08/virtual-light/